Thursday, March 12, 2015

Baber Interview

Because I had no childhood religion I was never in the position of others who have had to choose between rejecting their pre-philosophical religious beliefs in favor of their current philosophically informed views, keeping them in separate compartments, or somehow reconciling them. All the religion I had when I joined the Church I got from college classes, and from my reading.

When I joined the Church I was put off by its way of ‘engaging with religion’. Faculty at school, none of them religious believers, treated theological doctrines as philosophical claims, which even if false, were worth serious consideration. At church, the curate who taught my adult Confirmation Class reinterpreted them as edifying sentimentalities or dismissed them. In philosophy class, we considered the possibility of post-mortem survival, in church, the curate glossed the article on the resurrection of the dead in the Creed as ‘not pie in the sky when we die, but life in depth and fullness here and now’.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please understand that this weblog runs on a third-party comment system, not on Blogger's comment system. If you have come by way of a mobile device and can see this message, you may have landed on the Blogger comment page, or the third party commenting system has not yet completely loaded; your comments will only be shown on this page and not on the page most people will see, and it is much more likely that your comment will be missed.

Caveats

For a rough introduction to my philosophy of blogging, including the Code of Amiability I try to follow on this weblog, please read my fifth anniversary post. I consider blogging to be a very informal type of publishing - like putting up thoughts on your door with a note asking for comments. Nothing in this weblog is done rigorously: it's a forum to let my mind be unruly, a place for jottings and first impressions. Because I consider posts here to be 'literary seedings' rather than finished products, nothing here should be taken as if it were anything more than an attempt to rough out some basic thoughts on various issues. Learning to look at any topic philosophically requires, I think, jumping right in, even knowing that you might be making a fool of yourelf; so that's what I do. My primary interest in most topics is the flow and structure of reasoning they involve rather than their actual conclusions, so most of my posts are about that. If, however, you find me making a clear factual error, let me know; blogging is a great way to get rid of misconceptions.